Published: December 15, 2008

Spontaneous memorial shrines have become a standard mode of grief expression in modern Western society, says Erika Doss. The Notre Dame professor of American studies notes that the ritual has become commonplace, repeated whenever an unexpected tragedy happens.

Published: December 15, 2008

You got game? What kind? Choosing your video games, like choosing your friends, may affect the kind of person you become, a study led by Notre Dame Professor Darcia Narvaez with three of her students suggests.

Published: December 15, 2008

Plenty of Domers have made their mark in the world of entertainment. Among all the Domer glitter, however, only two so far have stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the entertainment sidewalks of renown along Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street.

Published: December 15, 2008

Growing up near the Lower Brule and Crow Creek reservations in South Dakota, I heard stories about Native Americans eating meals on family graves. Picnics in cemeteries blurred the line between the living and the dead in ways that seemed dangerously pagan to a little Catholic girl.

Published: December 15, 2008

Published: December 15, 2008

The students I taught when I first entered the classroom almost four decades ago are not all that different from those today, the current crop does possess skills about which I am distinctly disadvantaged.

Published: December 15, 2008

Published: December 15, 2008

Published: December 11, 2008

They’re watching Fox News on LaFortune’s big-screen TVs. They’re using cell phones as umbilical cords to double-check decisions with their parents. One professor reports they’re often unnerved about seminar classes, where the goal of lively debate seems to repeal their usual model of avoiding candid disagreements that might hurt someone’s feelings. “They’re deferential, almost to a fault,” says another professor.…

Published: December 11, 2008

Senior week—those days between the last exam and graduation, when seniors have the run of campus—is an odd time. It is a much anticipated interval of leisure and celebration, but it is shadowed by melancholy. One's undergraduate days are over, never to return.

One day during my senior week, in 1976, I passed up the day's organized activity and went for a final, solitary walk around campus. I ended up on a bench on the "God quad," outside LaFortune. It was a beautiful summer day, and the campus was quiet. As I rested, I asked myself: How had it happened that I had fallen so in love with Notre Dame?…

Published: December 11, 2008

I came to work at Notre Dame 28 years ago because I believed in the place. I’d had a great undergraduate experience, but it was a document written a few years later by Father Ted Hesburgh, CSC, that got me to commit to a career in South Bend, Indiana.

The statement set the University into its historical context and acknowledged the continuity of institutional life as it had evolved from the vision of its founder, Rev. Edward F. Sorin, CSC…

Published: December 11, 2008

I knew Ernest Sandeen for almost 50 years, first as a student, then as a faculty colleague. When I came to Notre Dame as a freshman in l948, Professor Sandeen, pictured at right, had been here, in the English Department, for two years. He still wore his World War II Navy crew cut, and he stood straight and square-shouldered, his chin prominent. He chuckled and snuffled a lot in class. My roommate and I had our private nickname for him: Chuckles. Chuckles Sandeen.…

Published: December 11, 2008

Justin Halls ’05 never expected his career path would depend on which way the winds blew. Newly placed with Teach for America in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, Halls was transferred to Houston in anticipation of a wave of evacuees. Then along came Rita, further displacing students and creating a surplus of teachers. The federally funded Teach for America organization made a deal with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and, five months after graduating from Notre Dame, Halls was managing the FEMA…

Published: December 11, 2008

*Tom Merriman '84,* an investigative reporter with WJW-TV in Cleveland, won the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Award, considered the Pulitzer Prize of broadcast journalism. The award honored his investigation into the Cleveland Municipal School District's transportation department, which found millions of dollars in waste, mismanagement, and the use of inflated data in state funding reports. . . . A short story by Tony D'Souza '00MFA,…

Published: December 11, 2008

_compiled by Carol Schaal_
*Running into the Arms of God: Stories of Prayer, Prayer as Story*, _by Patrick Hannon, CSC, '88M.Div_. (ACTA Publications). The Holy Cross priest here shares the experiences that speak to him of prayer. In 21 stories of work, of love, of pain and hope and family, he finds that each lived moment "holds forth the possibility of our being found by the God of Creation who because of His very nature searches us out." Each chapter is organized around the liturgical hours of the monastic day. The foreword is by Brian Doyle '78, editor of _Portland Magazine_.